Monday, June 02, 2008

Battlestar Galactica: Sine Qua Non

(S04E08) After two weeks of waiting, and through several other shows having their season finales, we're back for more frakking BSG, baby. And speaking of season finales, after watching Lost last night with all of its flashbacks and flash-forwards, it almost seemed as though we may be seeing a bit of flashbackery next week to explain what happened to Roslin and the others aboard the hijacked Base Star.

In case you're wondering what the title means, it's a latin legal term, of course.

I've never had a firm grasp on the whole Adama-Roslin relationship, though obviously it's been a budding one for some time now. It wasn't until this episode that we saw concrete affection for Roslin, Bill even saying he can't function without her around. And, with that, he quite honorably and logically takes himself out of active command until he can get his head on straight: e.g., he finds Roslin or dies trying.

In some of the opening scenes we saw the shot Six wasn't yet dead, with Cottle and his crew working frantically to save her. Seeing Six reach up as if "toward the light" and Cottle standing over her seemed either to scream out Cottle as a red herring (for being the final Cylon) or just made his stock price go up a few points. I'm going with the latter in this case.

How could they possibly trust Sharon again after going nuts and killing the Six? I've been bitching for weeks now that the comfort level they've given a known Cylon -- Sharon -- is a tough pill to swallow sometimes. I understand that she put her neck out for the colonials before, but this last incident should leave her in chains with the other Six.

As for the appointing of a new president, I legitimately felt bad for Zarek. Like was said to Bill Adama, they could do a lot worse than Zarek in the topmost place of power in the fleet. The guy seems to take his role of vice president seriously and took it on the chin to see Roslin in the high seat. Now when it's his time, he has it plucked away to please "the old man." He steps down so Adama's own son can be sworn in instead! If that's not enough points now to win over the trust of those who didn't at one time or another, short of taking a bullet for someone else, I'm not sure what will.

Then, of course, we had the return of Lampkin the lawyer. Can I just say that Sheppard as Lampkin, in that long trenshcoat, reminds me of early Phil Collins? Remember that video for ... nevermind. Anyway, the man clearly has more than a few marbles loose. It was a neat trick to show us a cat that wasn't there, but at the same time it was pretty sick to learn he was toting around a tiny corpse in that bag for weeks.

When the damaged Raptor showed up, as soon as I heard someone was going for a space walk, I thought we were going to see another redshirt death. I was half right, though, as it was Eammon Pike who appeared as a bloated mess aboard the mess of a ship. Scratch one off the population for this week.

As for pregnant Six, this clearly points out the differences that the final five have to previously-known skinjobs. As far as I recall, the Cylons have said they can't breed eith each other. Humans and Cylons -- different story. But this whole Tigh-Six "relationship," if you want to call it that, is just too weird and I'm really wondering where they're going with it. Damn, though, that was a mean fist fight between Adama and Tigh. If we can't get some decent space battle scenes, let's get the dukes out!

As a side note, I think we now know why Tigh was wearing admiral tags in scenes several episodes ago, as mentioned in one of Ron Moore's podcasts. They must have shot the sequences out of order is all I can summise.

Adama looked strange in a flight outfit, didn't he? Just didn't quite look right. And in case you missed it, we got aother glimpse of the Orion constellation again in that last scene.

Current fleet population:(Note: I take the population mentioned at the start of the episode and then subtract/add to that number based on what was shown or heard in this episode to get the number below)

39,672 (since last week it was 39,673 and this week was 39,674, we have +1 birth, -1 for Gonzo, probably -1 for Sandman